Help, my A08 burner doesn't work!!!!

I have been burning coasters with my new pioneer A08 burner and can't understand why. I have been using DVD xcopy xpress and everything seems to work fine but when I try to play the disk nothing happens. It doesn't even see the files and thinks it a blank disk. I finally tried to just copy files onto a cd using XP's built in cd writing to try and see if it is the burners fault and indeed it gives me an error "windows encountered a problem tyring to copy....." I assume that this must be a hardware issue? I updated the firmware for the drive but it didn't work. By the way, when xcopy gets done burning a DVD it seems to have the burn on the back. I originally had nero and dvd cloner but I deleted them to try to narrow this down. Do I need a third parter burning software besides xpress and XP Pro? Please help.

 

what brand of media are you using?

 

Maxell DVD+R. I tried some generic DVD-R's that have worked flawless in the past and they to fail.

 

Do you have ASPI drivers installed? Use nero system info. Box should be green for system ASPI and nero ASPI.